Language Recovery of the New South Wales South Coast Aboriginal Languages Part A Analysis and Philology Jutta Besold A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University. Submitted January 2012 Revised May 2013 Chapter A.8 Conclusion and Further Implications This chapter presents a summary of the purpose of this study and its content, and thoughts on its role in future language reclamation of the South Coast languages (SCLs hereon). A.8.1 Summary and Significance This research study aimed to serve a number of purposes: 1. to produce a comprehensive bibliography of, and metadata on, the historic and archival material that is available on the New South Wales SCLs. 2. to provide a collated database of all the language material found in these sources, which can be utilised by communities to add to their existing language knowledge, or as a starting point for language reclamation or revitalisation projects. 3. to provide more elaborate language descriptions on the SCLs than have to date been available, in order to allow Aboriginal communities and schools to teach the languages to a higher proficiency level than had previously been possible. 4. to fill the gap between recently produced language descriptions of Australian Aboriginal Languages (AALs hereon) from other parts of New South Wales and SCLs, and to add to the body of knowledge of AALs overall. To date there has been little information collated on the south-east NSW languages, and the findings in this study will assist in further typological studies of AALs. 5. to provide insight into the stages and processes involved in working exclusively from written archival material. To date very little has been published on the 338 methodologies of working with historic material in the context of AALs, and the discussion in this study will hopefully evoke public responses and further discussion from other researchers working in similar conditions. Part A of this work looked at the available language material of the SCLs, the philological aspects of working from/with this material and the analyses of the languages. Chapter A.1 functions as an annotated bibliography, listing all published and unpublished archival materials on the SCLs that have been located and identified to date, i.e. the material that provided the language corpus for this study. The list also contains later work on the SCLs grammars, including audio recordings produced between 1956 and the early 1970s that were not included in the corpus for the analysis in this study, and why. Each annotation to the archival material provided details of informants, where material was collected and any reference made to social and/or linguistic boundaries mentioned in that particular item, if information was given. Chapter A.2 gave insight into the processes and stages of working with the historic material. Analytical work on languages from archival/historic material requires philological work in order to understand spelling systems that were employed in the old sources, definition of terminology used at the time, and which educational literature was available at the time, that would have influenced the early collectors’ methodologies for their language work or collecting. The grammatical descriptions of the four SCLs covered in this study (Dharrawal, Dharumba, Dhurga and Djirringanj) were presented in chapters A.3-A.7 These chapters contained analyses that could be authoritatively derived from the historic material, which included the previously unanalysed eleven stories collected and transcribed by Mackenzie (1866, 1877, 1878). As a large part of working with these stories, morphemes were isolated and identified as having a particular function. This was in most cases only possible when several examples showing the use of the 339 morpheme were identified in the SCLs corpus, and through comparison of the more closely related NSW languages, and AALs from other parts of Australia. Whereas form and function of nominal suffixes were relatively easy to identify, verbal morphology leaves many questions unanswered at this stage. Mackenzie’s collected stories contain some verb constructions in which several morphemes remained unanalysed as to their function. Further studies and comparative work with the increasingly elaborate language work on AALs in the south east of Australia from archival material is likely to answer some of the questions regarding the form and function of these morphemes. Finally, Part B presented the heart and soul of this research study: the previously unanalysed texts of Mathews and Mackenzie, as well as all glossed sentences taken from unpublished and published sources. The inclusion of the texts and sentences in the main body of the dissertation may be considered unconventional. Traditionally, grammars are presented with texts and stories as appendices to support the analysis, but here, they were presented as part of the analysis for various reasons. For many AALs that have not had speakers for many decades, the available language corpus tends to be relatively small and may be limited to elicited material only. The linguistic and contextual features of these stories/narratives therefore supplied the SCL corpus with more than just morphological and lexical data, and are a rare occurrence amongst ‘sleeping’92 AALs that are relying on purely archival material for language reclamation purposes. Since there is no opportunity to verify observations on the function of the languages with speakers, the texts need to be easily accessible for the reader, or future researchers of these languages, to allow cross-referencing. Furthermore, the analysis of these texts took up the majority of time on this research project, and was an arduous 92 For explanation of this term see further in this chapter in section A.8.2. 340 process and not merely a matter of adding data into Shoebox/Toolbox and waiting for an interlinear glossing to appear. Due to the inconsistent spellings within each collector’s materials, different spelling systems between collectors and the misrepresentation of individual phones, as well as clustering or breaking up of words, the analyses of texts were not a straightforward task, but demanded (or resulted in) numerous reanalyses of phonemic transcriptions as well as morphological break-downs and identification and labelling of individual morphemes. At the time of writing, the texts are still far from having been completely exploited for their grammatical information, but future and ongoing work with the SCLs as well as the growing number of other NSW AALs being reanalysed will add to the ongoing analysis. Mackenzie’s collection of Dharrawal and Dharumba texts provide information on narrative styles and features of natural speech such as reduplication, use of onomatopoeic words, ideophones and/or exclamations and other discourse features identified in the direct speech and conversations embedded in the stories. Extracting information on these features allows Aboriginal communities to reclaim and teach their languages that show these aspects of natural languages, rather than reconstituting a carefully constructed language that lacks the features of actively spoken languages. Since so much information on the SCLs can be gained from the texts and stories, the exclusion of these texts and stories from previous language work on the SCLs seems an oversight, but an understandable oversight given the limited time Eades was given to undertake and publish her language analysis. Eades’ statement: As with R.H. Mathews’ texts, Mackenzie’s stories are unfortunately not very helpful but they do illustrate some of the grammatical points made in R.H. Mathews’ grammar. (Eades, 1976:11) probably reflected the then generally held low opinion amongst the Australian linguistic community on language work based on archival material. Previously greater importance was placed on fieldwork linguistics and describing languages that were 341 still spoken at the time. But defining concepts such as ‘documentary’ versus ‘descriptive’ linguistics, that address the need for change in the methodology of language description of languages that are no longer spoken, has become an increasing topic of discourse amongst linguists (for example see Himmelmann (1998) and (2006), and Bowern (conference presentation in 2009)). The recent years have also seen a remarkable productivity in language work on the ‘sleeping’ AALs in south-east Australia, see Dhanggati (Lissarrague, 2007), Gathang (Lissarrague, 2010), Gumbaynggirr (Morelli, 2008), Darkinyung (Jones, 2008), Hunter River Lake Macquarie language (Lissarrague, 2006), Gamilaraay/Yuwaalaraay (Ash et al, 2003); Canberra language and neighbouring inland languages (Koch, 2009 and 2011a+b), Sydney language (Steele, 2005), and Gandangara (Besold, 2003). As part of this activity in language work on NSW languages, the Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Cooperative also published the (long awaited) Handbook of Aboriginal Languages of New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory (Wafer et al, 2008) which, amongst other things, contains basic information on available source material, wordlists and phonemic inventories of all the presently identified indigenous languages of NSW. These works are based solely on archival material in some languages, and a combination of archival material and data collected on recordings and/or last remaining speakers in others. All published grammars referred to above are on coastal and neighbouring NSW languages. Grammars and/or